Thermal imaging cameras are used to observe temperature variations in a variety of situations. For example, thermal imaging cameras are often used during maintenance inspections to thermally inspect equipment. Example equipment may include rotating machinery, electrical panels, or rows of circuit breakers, among other types of equipment. Thermal inspections can detect equipment hot spots such as overheating machinery or electrical components, helping to ensure timely repair or replacement of the overheating equipment before a more significant problem develops.
Thermal imaging cameras include sensors for detecting infrared energy in a scene being viewed by the camera. An example of such a sensor is a focal plane array (FPA) which generates an electrical signal in response to infrared energy received through the camera lens. The FPA includes sensor elements, such as bolometers or photon detectors, and each such sensor element may be referred to as a sensor pixel. The electrical resistance or voltage of the sensor pixels changes in response to infrared energy and can therefore be used to generate a thermal image or thermogram.
Infrared images are often “annotated” with additional information that is either provided by the user or known by the camera (e.g. date/time, location, calibration range, emissivity setting, etc.). Often, the user will forget to input the appropriate information and will either have to edit the image/annotation data later (i.e., to correct it or add to it well after the image is captured) or just use the image without any annotation. This could prove troublesome if an unannotated thermal image is recalled for reference some significant amount of time after capture. It is possible that, without annotations, important details of the image may be uncertain or completely forgotten. Moreover, to the extent that something in the environment and/or “use context” has changed during the image capture process, the user may not be able to later recall sufficient information needed to annotate the image with the change in use context.